Author: Michael

A little time with Amazon Unbox

I’d been reading a bit about Amazon Unbox and its use with TiVos for a few months. But I’d always thought of it as a competitor to using iTunes with my AppleTV, which seemed like the obvious answer for how I’d potentially download movies and TV shows to my living room. Then it caught me at the right moment, and now I’m sold.

In preparation to see the new Bourne movie, we had set a Wishlist for “Bourne” to catch the previous two. We saw the first, but the second never arrived since it was never broadcast on a channel we received. So I tried using Universal Swivel Search. And the brilliance of the Amazon Unbox integration kicked in. The TiVo told me that there were no upcoming broadcasts of the movie, but that I could download it for $3.99. That seemed easy, so I did it.

The TiVo asked for three pieces of information: my Amazon account email address and password, and my TiVo.com password. Then I authorized the download, and it began. That was it – no drive to Blockbuster, no envelope from Netflix. I didn’t even have to go to my computer to use iTunes.

Now it didn’t come down immediately. Frankly, I don’t even know how long it took, but the next night it was there, ready for me. So far, so good.

The next part was a bit rocky, and, to me, surprising.

Let me step back a moment. Amazon has two options for most downloads: rent or purchase. If you rent, the media downloads and sits for up to a month, waiting for you to watch it. If you purchase, you get it endlessly. I rented.

As an aside – some movies can only be purchased. This may be an early stage of the movie’s release, or it may be an issue with the copyright.

So my wife and I sat down to watch the movie after the kids went to sleep one night. When we started the movie, the TiVo made clear that once we started, we had only 24 hours of potential viewing of the movie. We could watch it as much as we wanted in that 24 hours, but after that it would be deleted from the hard drive. Now I understand that we can’t have it forever, but 24 hours? My viewing pattern is something like a max of one hour after the kids go to sleep. I just can’t do two hours in a row, especially on a week night. I could do two nights in a row to finish a movie, but this model doesn’t allow that. Start at 9 PM one night, and if you sit down at 9 PM the next night, it’s gone. I do, of course, get to watch it as many times as I want in that 24 hour period – does anyone care about that feature? But, OK, those are the rules.

Here’s the warning I’d get if I were to try to start watching from the beginning and I’d run out of my rental time before the movie could finish.

Of course, the movie isn’t over 400 minutes long. Not sure what bug caused that.

But back to watching my rental/download!

The wonderful side of the TiVo takes over. No DVD to insert, no unskippable intro video, no impenetrable (and slow) DVD menu to navigate. No obligatory painful music loop. It’s like watching a movie that I recorded – so, so much better than a DVD, always. This, alone, would make the whole system worthwhile to me. I get instant reply, I get my TiVo remote. I get intuitive control.

I understand that the ability to download a movie in HD isn’t quite ready. The bandwidth required, and the storage capacity at Amazon, just aren’t feasible – but they will be soon. So my movie downloaded at a lower resolution. But, strangely, the movie was the right aspect ratio for HD – just letterboxed all the way around.

You can see from the above picture, that the image could have been enlarged to fill the screen, and without losing the proper ratio. (This image capture was done with S-Video, so it’s narrowed, but on my HD TV, it looks correct.) I’m not really sure why the OS doesn’t let me zoom this to fit my screen. It gets first letterboxed into an SD aspect ratio, then the TiVo letterboxes that with black borders to fill the screen width-wise.

The other great benefits of the TiVo are right there – and, again, compared to a DVD, they pretty important: I can sit down the next night and start again where I left off – no ff’ing to find the right chapter or any of that. I can get info with the info button. I can rate it with my thumb ratings. And I don’t have to send it back, or own another piece of plastic.

In the music world, I haven’t been all that keen on downloading music rather than ordering a CD (of course, Radiohead is the exception!). With music, I want the actual CD. I want to read the notes, and I want to be able to grab it and listen in my car or in the garage, or the kids might want to play it in their room. But with movies, the download method is just much more sensible. I really don’t want it after I’ve watched it – I don’t want to own a stack of DVD cases. And I’ll only watch it one my one TV. And I’ll only watch it once.

Amazon has been marketing this new service a few ways. There are ads all over their site. There are ads on the TiVo. And, maybe best of all, there are free and discounted movies from time to time. The last free ones were some old classics (but you can’t complain about a free download of “8 1/2”). But then each Friday, they put a list of movies up for rent at $.99. (Since I wrote this originally, they seem to pop up with discounted movies on various days.) You don’t have to watch them on the discount day, just set them to download. Then you’ve got 30 days. I will say that on my Mac, their Unbox page is painfully slow so I usually browse on my TiVo, but I’m sold – and you should try it out.

Try Amazon Unbox

Starting today, changes are coming to TiVo service pricing. In most cases, pricing goes down, or the minimum commitment gets shorter. The one place where the pricing is going up is on the Multi-Service discount pricing:

As far as we understand, this pricing is for NEW activations of units. Existing units should be grandfathered in to current pricing, or should be able to be changed to lower pricing, if available, when their current commitment is over.

Finally, there’s a way to start getting lifetime service again – this time for $399 . . . but you have to be a current TiVo customer (meaning you have a box on an account with active service) and you can add a new unit, and get lifetime for $399. So essentially, this is like “lifetime multi-service” for $399. But theoretically, if/when the main box on your account comes to the end of its term, this will become the main unit on your account, and all others should renew at the MSD fee. Anyway, this is valid until February 13, 2008.

Want lifetime, even as a new customer? You can still get it on our Humax DVD TiVo DVRs.

See TiVo’s pricing plans page for more info.

If you’re looking to transfer lifetime service from an older unit to a TiVo HD, get moving! The $199 lifetime transfer offer from TiVo expires on November 8, 2007. You don’t need to have your unit by then, but you do need to have the unit ordered by that date in order to make it all happen – then you have a month to do the actual transfer.

We absolutely guarantee that WeaKnees TiVo HD units qualify – all sizes from the stock 20 hour unit to our jumbo 145 hour one. Just be sure to prequalify with TiVo to make sure your older unit is eligible

Many of our customers (and many, many other TiVo users) have been reporting problems with some recent versions of the DirecTV TiVo OS. There are two sets of problems, affecting two types of models currently.

For the standard definition DirecTV TiVos (includes all RCA and Samsung models, and Hughes and Philips models that have USB on the back, and the DirecTV R10): Units with 6.3e have been rebooting. This problem seems to be related to using the “standby” mode on the unit, and is greatly, if not completely, alleviated by not using “standby” anymore. “Standby” is a mode where the TiVo just cuts its video output – it’s not saving any power or turning the unit off in any way. So there’s really no advantage to using “standby” unless you have a TV with only one video input and you need to pass other video through the TiVo.

For the high definition (HD) DirecTV HR10-250: This unit has seen a lot of rebooting in the past few weeks – almost always with OS versions 6.3d and earlier. In this case, 6.3e seems to solve the problems. To make sure you get the latest OS version, you need your phone line plugged into the TiVo so that it can get authorized for the download. Also, experiences are showing that rebooting is generally happening during CBS shows for some reason, likely related to guide data problems. A “clear and delete guide data” will often fix the problem, at least temporarily. But the best answer is to get the latest OS version for the HR10.